Today we shepherded the chickens for almost an hour. The grass is so tall they get lost as they explore for little bugs. Roosty likes to pick large grass blades and call all the girls over as if he just hunted down the biggest mammoth to feed his flock.

The girls ignore him of course. I tell him he needs to do better than a floppy piece of grass but he doesn't listen.

It brings me a lot of joy to watch them free range; although they're naughty and never want to go back into their run. But its getting a little easier to convince them. Or at least I like to think so.

I've been meditating again almost every day. It does seem to make a difference when dealing with emotions. I've been able to catch myself several times when I'm about to react and stop from acting on the feelings.

I experienced exquisite and peaceful moments the other day while meditating and I think that has lightened the mind a bit from all the doom and gloom it naturally gravitates towards. A bit of a bright spot to give me the slightest inclination that there might be hope after all.

Its definitely pleasurable but I'm trying not to get too attached to it. The Buddha did say that the pleasure of Jhana is not something to be afraid of and it should be cultivated [1] so we'll see what happens.

I worked on a script to remove prefixes and suffixes from videos downloaded with yt-dl. It will rename the files without the given prefix and the video id.

#! /usr/bin/env bash

function replace_spaces_with_underscores() {
    echo "$1" | sed "s/ /_/g"
}

function trim() {
    input="$1"
    prefix="$2"

    echo "$input" | sed "s/$prefix//" | sed "s/_\[.*]\.mp3/\.mp3/"
}

prefix="$1"

if [ -z "$prefix" ]; then
    echo "Usage clean_yt_file_name prefix"
    exit 1
fi


for filename in *; do
    filename_underscores=$(replace_spaces_with_underscores "$filename")
    prefix_underscores=$(replace_spaces_with_underscores "$prefix")
    trimmed=$(trim "$filename_underscores" "$prefix_underscores")
    mv "$filename" "$trimmed"
done

This speeds up the manual clean up process but I still need a way to maintain the order of the songs if they're part of a playlist. I'm thinking of adding this clean up functionality to musik [2].

We watched the movie Midnight In Paris (2011) with Owen Wilson. I love time travel movies but this one had a somewhat disappointing ending. Some parts, also, didn't make much sense. Like when he finds the girl's journal and when they travel back to the 1800s. I think they could have done a better job making it clear what was going on there.

I also couldn't stand the fiancee character. I understand what they were going for but it felt overdone and intentionally upsetting. Wilson's character is a pretty intelligent and observant guy. So, for him not to catch onto what was happening and to put up with all her abuse didn't make much sense. There was no reason, financial or otherwise, for him to stay in that kind of relationship for as long as he did.

The movie does make a good point about nostalgia. We're never satisfied where we are so we think a previous time was a perfect age. As someone who enjoys time travel movies and thinks often about what I would do if I could travel back in time I agree. Life is difficult no matter what time you're in and wanting to be in a different era is a bit of escapism.

Overall I give it a 5/10 rating.